The second victim label ignores patient safety reality

Summary: When a medical procedure goes wrong, doctors and nurses feel terrible. For 20 years, hospitals have called them "second victims" and offered them counseling or resilience training. But this label is actually a trap. It distracts us from the real problem: broken hospital systems. When a nurse makes a mistake because they are forced to care for too many patients at once, giving them a counseling brochure doesn't fix the danger. We need to stop focusing on workers' feelings and start fixing the bad workflows and short staffing that cause medical errors in the first place.

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